When people become brands who can be schocked by the lies?

Dan Hicks had a great line many years ago, "How can I miss you when you won't go away?" He made a quirky song out of it.



This line always pops into my head when the bombast of world class liars and frauds intrudes too much into my little world.  The song has ebbed and flowed in my brain throughout the forty plus years I can remember first hearing it and then immediately thinking of Richard Nixon, and why he would just never go away. Until, finally, he did one late summer in 1974 just go away with a spastic wave before boarding a taxpayer funded helicopter to fly off into obscurity and exile. The awkward wave was almost Napoleonic in its bizarre parting gesture to a nation. The nation had had enough of Dick.

This first month of January in 2013 we have two characters filling the news pages with their tawdry stories of deceit, Lance Armstrong and Manti T'eo.  Lance utterly fails all attempts to categorize him as a human being. If you read any of the multitude of articles over the years and the many detailed accounts of the lengths his corporate goons went about attacking and ruining any person who actually spoke the truth you just want this guy to die instantly and disappear from recorded history. Sadly, this will not be the case. Lance just reaches the upper echelon of fakes during this age of money fueled  disinformation. Manti T'eo's story, although stupefying and a giant pie in the face to all who cover college football for a living, comes off as a stupid teen prank gone big-time bad for Notre Dame, and Manti T'eo. Of course, this hallmark university of all things college football can mourn a fake girl who died, but not one who committed suicide after getting the brush off from Notre Dame after accusing one of its football players of rape.

Here is a Rick Reilly column owning his swallowing hook, line and sinker every Lance lie. This could be the general media template for all upcoming articles of gullibility and no accountability by members of our illustrious advertising sponsor-paid press corps. The Daily Coyote has more journalistic integrity than nearly all the high paid talent working for big media and their advertisers today. No one pays this lady to spin a yarn a certain way. The photos are honest, not an advertiser's demand.

No rational person in the world should be surprised at these latest liars, just at how many there are these days. Let's be honest, we are still paying off the eight year misadventure called the Iraq War, which was waged on outright lies by the Bush Administration, and whose total cost can never be accurately measured. We have had the nation's key financial advisers fail to tell the truth regarding their casino exploits with credit swaps and mortgage securities bundled together as billion dollar investments not worth a thousand dollars. Major banks and lending institutions lied to their their borrowers repeatedly on what the true cost of the loans they sold would be for a decade. We lived through the 1990s where every baseball game was a fraud, and applauded for every home run until the juice story leaked through the muscled biceps of the armies of players injecting PEDs into their bodies. We have seen the lies at Penn State, and the awful repercussions of those victims, but Penn State certainly seems well enough after a short hiccup in the public consciousness. None in the major media outlets during any of these gargantuan frauds and abuses of power raised a finger to point out the truth, until way after the fact. And wasn't it just yesterday when we saw a different Tiger Woods and John Edwards?

The apologies are not even apologies today, just news cycle spin  filled with crocodile tears for the conglomerate media. The charlatans of today are now brands, incorporated piles of legal teams and media consultants. Sad day when people morphed into a brand of advertising piffle. I can't feel sorry for a brand. I feel pity for all those who swallow up whatever soap, fragrance or charity work the brand sells to make itself more powerful. 

May 4 -Forty Years of Grief-

Ah, fuck it, some things stick with you forever.

May 4, 1970 and  and I was thinking it' s just another miserable day counting the clock until my release from the prison adults call high school. Funny thing on this particular day, the government shot at a large crowd of anti-war students at a college campus in Ohio killing four young people in the 13 seconds of rifle fire. Even in the neolithic period before the Internet, and the 24/7 news crawls underneath the talking heads, the news traveled with a viral speed across the nation and world.

Protests emerged on most of the campuses throughout the nation during those spring days still protesting the US invasion of Cambodia and now the deaths of four college students. As the protests swelled nationwide, a bad night in Jackson Mississippi on May 14 took a real ugly turn by the early morning hours of May 15, 1970.

There were rumors that the Fayette Mayor and his wife had been shot, and a protest of about 100 students turned into a riot when fires were set and a dump truck was overturned on the Jackson State campus. Seventy-five heavily armed policemen and Mississippi State police offers came to quell the uprising. A broken bottle, a rock or brick thrown, an officer buckling -nobody really knows for sure what lit the fuse- but rapid fire commenced on the crowd in front of a Jackson State University girls dorm building and did not stop until a full 30 seconds had elapsed. Miraculously, only two young people died from the gunfire with twelve students being wounded. Every window on the street side view of the five story dormitory where the confrontation was resolved was shattered by police gunfire. The building took more than 460 bullets,  and many of those are still very visible today.   

Young and old alike who were on the fence chose sides on May 4, 1970 and in the weeks that followed. There was no longer any middle ground left on the issues of Viet Nam and American politics. You either marched into the hippie-peace-antiwar-treehugger-freak camp or you chose the conservative-religious-guns-nationalism outpost to stake your future in.  

As summer drew near in the month following the Kent State and Jackson State riots, President Nixon created the Commission on Campus Unrest. Thirteen hearings would be held and nothing of consequence would be gained. No one was found guilty of doing anything wrong. No one was fired for stupidity. Zip. By the time the commission convened to do its nothingness, summer break had all ready taken most of the gas out of the angry protests. When schools reconvened in the fall there was simply another new great divide that had formed silently in the nation, but the big era of protest had literally been shot down.
 
After forty years people from both sides are no closer to finding any common ground. The context of the word games people play to score current political points have changed but the divide created after Kent State-Jackson State massacres has only grown over the years. This divide has widened because the national paranoia has has exploded over the last forty years. The killings that occurred over those eleven days in May opened a giant gash where fear crept into the soul of the nation.

This dread of a US government in total control and without a sense of either fairness or justice has remained with the American consciousness in varying degrees since the May days of 1970. For a few interludes, like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the brief bubble-worlds of dot.com and real estate, the malady waned, but then suddenly reappeared more virulent and dangerous than before. It has become a cancer in the patient, and the patient is us. The absurdity of our situation is that although the extremes of both the left and right both share an equal fear of the omnipotent government the great divide prevents real dialog from curing the patient.

So we find ourselves forty years later on this day listening to a couple of songs by two major pop music artists like Neil Young and  Steve Miller to hear what all that anger was about. Or maybe you can hear in many of The Pretenders songs the voice of a young female student on the campus at the time filled with a bitterness and resolve. Or put on that Joe Walsh classic Turn to Stone and hear what he was thinking being a former student.

The songs have stood the test of time, too bad the fear has as well. 

Try peace this century.

April Fools

Sun's up. A morning breeze cools the french roast in my hand with doves, jays and sparrows taking their usual breakfast places underneath the plum tree. The dog trots on patrol from one side of the yard to the other letting out various low sounds of growl indicating a feline intruder wandered the grounds recently. The morning commute echos in the air, forming the usual wall-of-sound din that serves as the sonic background to my urban lifestyle. My big cat inside the house peers through the french-door windows with a look of disgust at his imprisonment. I walk inside with the dog to cheer him up. It's not my endearments, but the offering of dried salmon which rescues the awkward reality. The lady inmate cats appear quickly to receive their usual ration of dried fish, which always must follow the big guy's preferred bribe.

The cracks in the stucco need a patch and quick touch of paint. I retrieve my tools and arm myself with latex gloves. I cover the spider web lines of separation at a corner and underneath a few of the windows. I complete the fill in the back of the house where a broom handle marks the final area of wear. A fast brush after getting the paint put back together with a quick stir ends the project.

Several kids move up and down the street with ipod cords bouncing in rhythm to their steps. I see a lot of kids out and about throughout the town everyday. Apparently school schedules must be on flex time these days.

NPR buzzes with Sam Donaldson. Sam serves up some memories of Nixon, and actually praises Oliver Stone's film of the same name. Sam tells a funny story about questioning Ronald Reagan amid his popularity slide in the early eighties when the economy was about as bad today. Reagan, as Obama does today, had a habit of always reminding the nation that the previous office holder and party created the mess. Sam's question was when would Ronald Reagan accept responsibility for some of this financial crisis. Reagan's response was funny. He acknowledged that, yes, he had once been a Democrat.

I need some tunes on to calm the critters before heading out the door. I put on a collection of oldies the Nixon chronicles had tweaked into my brain. Arthur Lee exclaims, "I just got out my little red book the minute you said goodbye......................... There's just no getting over you."